The title screen opens with an audio background of white noise and buzzing, suggesting the ocean and warning klaxons.
We find ourselves on the bridge of the Titanic, as the ill-fated captain of the ship. If we LOOK WINDOW, we learn that You see something large and white. So, yes, we're aboard THAT Titanic.
And before I say anything else, let me warn you, as always, that if you wish to play Dateline Titanic on your own, you ought to go and do so now. Because there are...
***** ICEBERGS AND SPOILERS AHEAD! *****
Dateline Titanic definitely has a sense of humor. The opening is a bit of a set piece -- we're not allowed to leave the helm, though once we realize we're heading straight for the iceberg, we can TURN WHEEL. This leads to what appears to be a swift and honorable conclusion -- we have apparently altered the course of the ship, and history, within a few moves. So now what? The game soon tells us: OH MY GOD! You hit another one! And we're right back where history tells us we should be:
We must now try to save as many people as we can and put them in lifeboats, collect valuables, and save ourselves to attain the maximum possible score.
The interface is old-fashioned -- there are no windows or status lines, just scrolling text that occasionally resets when we enter a new room or take a LOOK. If we type beyond the first onscreen line and try to backspace, the engine picks up the onscreen prompt What do you want to do? as part of the typed command. LOOK [anything] returns You see nothing special, even if the referenced object does not exist in the game; in general, the parser design tends to give default responses for non-existent objects, and never admits it doesn't know what something is, which can be misleading on occasion.
The game design is fairly open -- the puzzles aren't very intertwined, so we can explore and solve them at leisure; there's no actual time pressure involved, despite the sinking ship. Most of the puzzles involve accessing locked cabins by finding the appropriate keys, then convincing the passengers to get aboard one of the lifeboats. A puppy dog wandering randomly around the boat has a collar; LOOK COLLAR reveals a key. (There's no EXAMINE verb here, but LOOK works with both rooms and objects). An attempt to GET KEY initially yields OUCH! Puppy bites, so that's a puzzle we must overcome.
The radio room near the helm contains a CODE KEY that we can't take with us, but we can use it to SEND MESSAGE to summon a rescue ship. And the captain's room contains a safe, yet when we try to OPEN SAFE, we are told You can't remember the combination; it's nice to see an adventure game explicitly acknowledge the mysterious amnesia that so often afflicts the protagonist. I had to come back to this puzzle later in the game, and it stumped me for a while until I tried to MOVE SAFE -- I had been picturing a wall safe, but apparently it's a floor model. Moving it reveals a PAPER NOTE with the combination written down by our absent-minded character. We can then READ NOTE and OPEN SAFE to find some valuable JEWELRY.
We will encounter a FRANTIC PASSENGER at some point, and the first time we LOOK PASSENGER the game reveals CABIN KEY #101. We can only GET KEY when the puppy is not present, as the parser seems to assume we're referring to the key on his collar first, and GET CABIN KEY is not a recognized clarification. Once we are canine-free, it tells us Say again & use number, so in this case we have to GET 101.
Fortunately, the ship has a number of lifeboats, already in the water and ready to go, positioned at regular intervals along the Main Deck. Each boat has 4 seats, and if we LOOK LIFEBOAT the game will tell us how many empty seats remain -- until all are occupied, at which point we no longer see anything special. This is an important detail to track, because if we overload a lifeboat, it and all its passengers go straight to Davey Jones' Locker.
The waiter in the shipboard restaurant must be rescued, but not before we conduct a little business. ORDER DRINK oddly yields Waiter says, You can't. But ORDER COFFEE works.
The puzzles aren't particularly realistic, but they are entertaining. A DRUNK LADY in one of the cabins proves difficult to rescue, as She staggers all over the place! You can't catch her! If we give her the coffee, however, she becomes the much more cooperative SOBER LADY.
Another cabin has (anachronistically) loud music blasting from the bathroom, so that the lady inside can't hear your calls! Resolving this requires us to find the fuse box near the ship's engine room, and we need something to CUT WIRE (GET WIRE responds There's no "WIRE" here, but CUT recognizes it successfully.) The chandelier in the Grand Ballroom falls on our second visit, barely misses you... and leaves some useful broken bulbs in its wake, which prove sharp enough to cut the wire. Now we can rescue the ANGRY LADY who was blasting her music earlier, though we can't get into her locked bathroom under any circumstances, it seems.
Yet another cabin gives us the mysterious clue, Mrs. Vanderbilt's cabin is empty! This famous and wealthy passenger is, we discover, hiding out in the kitchen, underneath a table; the only clue to her whereabouts is that a soup bowl on the table turns out to be a valuable antique upon closer examination. I happened to find her just because I tried to MOVE TABLE.
In another cabin, a baby lies abandoned in its crib. If we MOVE CRIB after rescuing the baby, we find a HEARING AID. This puzzled me for a while -- we can't USE or WEAR it. EMPLOY AID appeared to work when I tried it, but then I realized the parser was just dropping it, apparently treating EMP (empty?) as a synonym for DROP. Later, I met a hard-of-hearing passenger who refused to leave the ship until I could GIVE AID, so she would listen to reason instead of defending herself with a knife.
Some of the keys are difficult to come by. It was only by accident I discovered that entering the ship's furnace room with the ice cube in hand reveals that Something melts..., leaving a cabin key behind.
It's probably best that this is not an illustrated adventure, because we find a lady taking a bath in another room. When we try to GET LADY, we learn that Her toe's stuck in the drainhole. I guessed correctly that some margarine from the kitchen would be applicable here, but I couldn't USE, APPLY, PUT or GIVE it to any effect. At last I figured out that if we RUB MARGARINE, the game acknowledges the action with a simple Ok!; now if we GET LADY, we are informed that Margarine helped... and we can get her into a lifeboat, naked but alive.
The ship's Library contains shelves, a desk, and a newspaper; the librarian sitting at the desk isn't immediately mentioned until we LOOK DESK, but we do need to rescue this character as well. We can't SEARCH SHELVES or GET BOOK or READ BOOKS... but we can LOOK BOOK to find a dictionary. GET DICTIONARY works now, and the item in inventory is revealed as a CHINESE-ENGLISH DICTIONARY. READ DICTIONARY establishes that You now know how to say, "the boat is sinking" in Chinese.
This matters because the CHINESE LADY in another cabin proves vexing -- she doesn't understand why we are trying to escort her out of her room, and the game tell us that She's an expert in karate and threatens you with a convincing demonstration! Once we have read the dictionary, she will allow us to escort her to safety.
The valuable bowl in the kitchen has a functional use -- it contains hot alphabet soup. But some patience is called for -- we can't GET BOWL, because You might spill the soup! We can't EAT SOUP either, at least at first, because it's reportedly Too hot. I tried to DROP CUBE, to see if the ice might be used to cool the soup, but that had no effect. After some time has passed, however, things change, and EAT SOUP yields It's cooled now hmm...delicious..., and reveals another key, formerly concealed at the bottom of the bowl.
Another cabin contains a CRYING CHILD; when we try to GET CHILD, the poor non-gender-specific thing sobs, "Find me my puppy dog." If we track down the wandering puppy and give it the soup bone from the kitchen, we can GET KEY from his collar, and also GET PUPPY. Returning the little dog to the child transforms him or her into a HAPPY CHILD WITH PUPPY, suitable for immediate rescue.
One of the more involved puzzles involves a tiny crack under a cabin door in the southwest corner of the ship (yes, this is a shipboard game, but the map does not reference port, starboard, fore or aft). We can LOOK KEYHOLE to see that there's a key inserted on the other side, and then SLIDE NEWSPAPER, POKE KEYHOLE (PUSH does not work, though it seems like it should), and GET NEWSPAPER. Now we have CABIN KEY #106, and can enter the cabin, where we find the ship's steward sleeping in bed; we can't wake him, but we can GET STEWARD manhandle him into a lifeboat without disturbing him.
There's no need to LAUNCH or RELEASE any of the lifeboats, and we can GO LIFEBOAT safely ourselves even all four seats are already occupied. I discovered early on that as soon as we GO LIFEBOAT, the game concludes that we have decided to save ourselves, and the adventure is over; my first "complete" game thus ended with a score of 0 out of a possible 3175. We don't have to enter the lifeboats to drop off passengers -- we can just PUT the person in any room with a lifeboat available, and they'll end up in the boat.
There's a vacuum cleaner on the ship; I couldn't figure out what to do with it until I decided to DROP VACUUM, revealing that Something falls out. The contents proved to be DIRT and a DIAMOND RING; LOOK DIRT yields CABIN KEY #105.
Some passengers don't require any additional coaxing, once we can get into their cabins; a YOUNG GIRL and one DAISY SMITH go readily to the lifeboats. There are a number of FRANTIC PASSENGERS at large, but only one appears at a time; most of the lifeboat slots will be filled with these randomly-appearing people. Once they have all been rescued, they stop appearing, but it's hard to be sure we've got them all unless we use the SCORE command to see how we're doing, after solving all of the other puzzles. This is the game's only major weak spot, in my opinion -- rescuing these passengers becomes far too random and repetitive.
There are no real death scenarios in Dateline Titanic -- at worst, we can end the game prematurely without scoring all of the possible 3175 points. But while working my way through the game, I actually managed to score excess points, finishing my first serious attempt with 3500 out of a possible 3175. I think this happens because the game code stores the score in a variable that does not get reset to zero when we RUN the program again after ending the game; the problem does not turn up with a clean reset.
When we are ready to finish up, GO LIFEBOAT wraps up the story:
Score aside, there are two possible endings -- if we neglected to send an SOS message from the Radio Room, even if we have scored all available points, we find ourselves floating in the ocean with no real hope of seeing dry land again. The best ending features the arrival of a rescue ship:
I enjoyed Dateline Titanic -- it's not meant to be a realistic presentation of the luxury liner's last hours, so it's free to have lots of goofy fun with the setting, and the author clearly enjoyed doing so. I did not find a published walkthrough anywhere for this game, so I have provided mine below the fold, and have also uploaded it to the CASA Solution Archive.
***** WALKTHROUGH *****
(You will want to draw a map, as there are some randomly traveling characters in the game that you will need to round up eventually. This walkthrough gives specific actions for most of the puzzles and navigation, but to score all the points you'll need to know your way around.)
LOOK WINDOW
TURN WHEEL (saved! or are we?)
E
SEND MESSAGE
W
S
E
MOVE SAFE
GET NOTE
READ NOTE
DROP NOTE
OPEN SAFE
GET JEWELRY
W
S, D, E
(if you encounter a FRANTIC PASSENGER anywhere along the way:
LOOK PASSENGER
GET 101
)
N, W, S
OPEN DOOR
GO DOOR
GET VACUUM
DROP VACUUM
GET RING
LOOK DIRT
GET 105
DROP VACUUM
W
S, S, E, N
DROP JEWELRY
DROP RING
W, D, S
ORDER COFFEE
W, W, E (chandelier falls)
GET BULBS
W
GO STAIRS
W
LOOK BOX
CUT WIRE
DROP BULBS
E
GO STAIRS
E, E, N, U, E
E
OPEN DOOR
GO DOOR
GIVE COFFEE (drunk lady sobers up)
GET LADY
S
PUT LADY
E
OPEN DOOR
GO DOOR
GET LADY (angry because power was turned off)
S
E
PUT LADY
E, E, E, S, E
LOOK BOOK
GET DICTIONARY
READ DICTIONARY
DROP DICTIONARY
GET LIBRARIAN
GET NEWSPAPER
W, N, W
PUT LIBRARIAN
E, N, E
OPEN REFRIGERATOR
GET MARGARINE
W, S, W
OPEN DOOR
GO DOOR
N
RUB MARGARINE
DROP MARGARINE
GET LADY
S, S
PUT LADY
W
OPEN DOOR
GO DOOR
GET LADY
S
E
PUT LADY
E, N, E
GET BONE
(Next time you see the PUPPY DOG after this point:
GIVE BONE
LOOK COLLAR
GET KEY)
MOVE TABLE
GET VANDERBILT
W, S, W
PUT VANDERBILT
E, N, E
GET CUBE
W, S, W
W, W, W, W, W
S, W, N
PUT NEWSPAPER
SLIDE NEWSPAPER
POKE KEYHOLE
GET NEWSPAPER (key #106 comes with it)
DROP NEWSPAPER
OPEN DOOR
GO DOOR
LOOK BED
GET STEWARD
DROP 106
W, S, E, N, E
PUT STEWARD
W, W, D, S, W, W
GO STAIRS (ice cube melts)
GO STAIRS
E, E
GET WAITER
N, U, E, E
PUT WAITER
W, N, N, E
OPEN DOOR
GO DOOR
GET BABY
MOVE CRIB
GET AID
N
PUT BABY
E
OPEN DOOR
GO DOOR
DROP 101
DROP 102
GET GIRL
N
E
PUT GIRL
OPEN DOOR
GO DOOR
GIVE AID
DROP 103
GET LADY
N
PUT LADY
E, E
OPEN DOOR
GO DOOR
GET DAISY
N
PUT DAISY
E, S, E
EAT SOUP (may have to try GET SOUP and EAT SOUP until it's cooled)
GET KEY
W, N, W, W
OPEN DOOR
GO DOOR
(Now, wander around the ship until you run across the PUPPY DOG again. He will probably still be where you gave him the bone. GET PUPPY and return to the CRYING CHILD.)
GIVE PUPPY
GET CHILD
N, W
PUT CHILD
DROP 104
DROP 105
W, W, W, S, S
GET JEWELRY
GET RING
SCORE (you should have 2900 points now)
(Now to the repetitive part. There are eleven FRANTIC PASSENGERs wandering around the ship, but they only appear one at a time. Every time you find one, GET PASSENGER, then find a LIFEBOAT, LOOK LIFEBOAT to ensure that has at least 1 empty seat, and PUT PASSENGER. If you overload the lifeboat, it will sink, taking all the passengers you've put into it to Davey Jones' Locker!)
Once FRANTIC PASSENGERS stop showing up, you should have all 3175 points. Use SCORE to confirm. Then find a lifeboat (it's okay if it's already full) and GO LIFEBOAT.
Victory!
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